There is more government oversight of your automobile than your voting machine.

Unlike an automobile, when a voting system fails in most jurisdictions across the country, manufacturers are not required to report the malfunction or failure to any government agency, there's no agency that investigates alleged failures and there's no entity that alerts election officials and the public of possible problems, a recent report from the Brennan Center for Justice found.

"As this report demonstrates, the consequence of this lack of oversight is predictable," the report summary states. "Voting systems fail in a particular county in one election, and then again later, under similar circumstances, but in a different locale. These repeated failures disenfranchise voters and damage public confidence in the electoral system."

Included in the report is a case study on Humboldt County's November 2008 election, when a previously known flaw in Premier Elections Solutions went uncorrected and unreported, leading to almost 200 ballots being dropped from the county's final tally. Released earlier this month, the report's publication comes just as a bill sponsored by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen aiming to make elections equipment vendors more accountable sits on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk. Last year, the governor vetoed a similar version of the bill that had been inspired by Humboldt County's election problems.

Lawrence Norden, who authored the Brennan Center report titled "Voting System Failures: A Database Solution," said the Humboldt County snafu in 2008 seems to hit at the heart of the issue.

A programming error in Premier Elections Solutions led to 197 vote-by-mail ballots disappearing from the final ballot tally as tabulated by the company's software. The problem was traced back to what is now known as the "Deck Zero" bug, an error in the particular version of software used in Humboldt County that sometimes results in the first deck of ballots scanned through the vote-counting machines vanishing from the final results.

Premier, the company formerly known as Diebold, became aware of the "Deck Zero" bug in 2004, but never notified the Secretary of State's office and instead simply sent an e-mail instructing its customers how to avoid the error. Then Humboldt County Elections Manager Lindsey McWilliams said he received the e-mail from Premier and utilized the "work around," but the information was never passed along to others in the Elections Office or to McWilliams' successor, Carolyn Crnich.

The Brennan Center report recommends the creation of a public, searchable and centralized database where elections officials, vendors and even voters can report voting system failures. The database just might have saved those 197 votes, the report contends, adding that Crnich said she would have checked the database and known of the programing error before Election Day.

Currently, the federal Elections Assistance Commission is tasked through the Help America Vote Act of 2002 with acting as a clearinghouse for information on voting equipment and problems associated with it. The problem, however, is that the commission has no authority to demand that manufacturers report issues with their equipment.

"They don't really have the power to make the kind of clearinghouse or database that we would like to see," Norden said. "They don't have the regulatory power that a consumer product safety commission has. They can't force vendors to notify them of problems."

The legislation sitting on Schwarzenegger's desk, however, might change that to a degree, at least for equipment used in California.

The bill -- Senate Bill 1404 by Sen. Fran Pavley, D-Santa Monica -- would require election equipment vendors to immediately report any errors, flaws or malfunctions to the California Secretary of State's Office, which would then be required to report them to the Elections Assistance Commission. Vendors or manufacturers that know of a problem but fail to report it would face a $50,000 fine.

A similar version of the bill was vetoed in 2009 by Schwarzenegger, who indicated he felt the fines may restrict companies' ability to do business in California. Secretary of State spokeswoman Nicole Winger said some concerns surrounded the 2009 version of the bill and the possibility that the fines could be imposed per voting machine as opposed to per violation.

Winger said the current version makes plain that the fines would not be applied per voting machine.

"There just doesn't appear to be any good reason not to sign this bill," Winger said. "Public disclosure seems common sense and certainly necessary when we're talking about voting systems."

Norden said he's keeping a close eye on the bill -- which the governor has until Sept. 30 to take action on -- saying he believes it would be a strong step in the right direction, not just for the state but for the nation, as it would provide an indirect avenue for the Elections Assistance Commission to get and transmit information.

In addition to the creation of a national database, the Brennan Center report also includes other recommendations, including instituting national vendor reporting requirements, creating a federal agency with powers to investigate and instituting appropriate government enforcement mechanisms.

Norden also had some special praise for the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, which uncovered the missing ballots in the 2008 election.

The project -- the first of its kind in the nation -- passes every ballot cast in an election through an optical scanner after it's officially counted. Those images are then placed online, along with open-source software created by Mitch Trachtenberg that allows viewers to sort and count the ballots as they see fit. It was through the transparency project that officials first noticed a vote discrepancy in 2008, and ultimately discovered the vanished ballots.

"I think it's great," Norden said of the project. "The more transparency in the tallying of votes, the better and, obviously, it helped detect and fix a real problem. I think it's a great model and I would like to see others."